Growth Insider: Success is always an experiment away

You’d probably be surprised to find out that working with customers is… Well, all about the customers. A very common mistake among startups and inexperienced business entrepreneurs is embracing a brand image, a content strategy, and an advertising approach that are solely based on their personal taste and mindset.

The sooner you overcome your vanity and become more client-oriented, the better your business survival chances are. You don’t know how to trigger your audience into action? Chill out - no one actually knows that for sure. The best you can do is to experiment and to precisely evaluate the statistics that follow your experiments.

Making a rearrangement in your website categories, polishing your copy, challenging your online community, changing your newsletter formula, designing an exit-intent popup or coming up with a crazy landing page? There is no wrong answer, neither a right one, until the numbers say so. In the following paragraphs, you can find two very different, yet most impressive experimental campaigns along with the numbers that prove them working.

AutoScout24

AutoScout24 is one of Europe’s largest online marketplaces for new and used automobiles. The company managed to increase the conversion rate of their contact form by 22% by simply making some minor changes to the form itself. Why and how did they do that?

An ongoing user research study of AutoScout24 (also a wise thing to perform every now and then) showed that customers often abandon the contact form because they feel insecure about how to address the other party and initiate a communication process. So how about an automatically filled-in contact form?

After A/B testing the idea with Optimizely, the results happened to be quite clear - people loved the idea of not having to address someone personally. That’s how a simple contact form experiment led to a gigantic boost of business revenue at the end of the day.

Code.org had the bright idea to introduce millions of students across the USA to computer science during their “Hour of Code” campaign. How did they manage to engage 15 million people in less than 5 days and increase their signups by nearly 30%? No, they didn’t spend a fortune, nor did they re-discover the wheel. They experimented with the campaign’s copy, its message, and its call to action.

What their team did was simply a very well-played message manoeuvring. It perfectly matched both the cultural character of the region and the hot topic of our decade - community engagement. Playing the gentle “exemplary citizen” string turned out to be a groundbreaking idea for the campaign and played a huge part in its ultimate success story.

There are literally millions of other business experiment and growth hacking case studies that tell a different story with the same moral: never settle with what you already did. Think bigger, dig deeper and analyze further. Hypothesize, rearrange, investigate and improve - because “everything flows and nothing abides” -from Heraclitus’ Ancient Greece until this very day.